How to Lose Friends

Newsman, playwright, novelist and Hollywood script mechanic, Ben (The Front Page) Hecht, 63, has always been a fast man with the spoken word. He is so fast, in fact, that ever since he took over a TV weeknight interview show on Manhattan's WABC this fall, his guests have been hopelessly outclassed in the fight for mike time. Mixing it up with experts in varied fields ranging from erotica to execution by hanging, Hecht has been calculatedly outrageous and often funny. Last week he turned on Hollywood, bit the hands that used to feed him.

P: Producers. Most of them "became bosses because they were serious-looking fellows. They knew nothing but could talk fast." Cecil B. DeMille "has been sort of a one-man dark ages that has reigned in Hollywood for 30 or 40 years. He learned the trick of making movies about horses, for horses, and he got terribly wealthy." But Sam Goldwyn is "a higher-class fellow. A fine producer, he has no head . . . He has a very intellectual stomach. It would react at a distance of 50 pages. If you were reading a script and it had a wrong passage, Sam's stomach would react. He would turn pale and green."

P: Writers. "They have small chins and big heads and cannot win an argument." The few writers he knew who have fought back, Hecht remembered warmly. His favorite rebel: Charles (Fearless Pagan) Lederer, who came to work looking like a "decadent Huck Finn" and was in love with "the most highly paid musical comedy star in New York [Marilyn Miller]." One day she took him to lunch, read him the riot act about rising at a respectable hour and taking daily baths. "When she got done, Charlie handed her his trousers, which he had taken off during the conversation and said, 'Here, my darling, you wear them.' And he walked out of her life." It would be wonderful, said Hecht, if Charlie's attitude "was the attitude of the young world toward its fatheaded, sham-filled adults."

P: Columnists. "Hedda Hopper I like. She's a gallant, crazy old gal with lots of steam. But Louella Parsons I don't like. Louella used to be a reporter with me in Chicago; she was one of the worst reporters the town ever knew . . . She's positively one of the most sad things in Hollywood. She makes it seem like a town full of boss lovers--which it is. She bows when the boss is not there, just his shadow."

It came as no surprise to his listeners when Hecht admitted that he has no friends in Hollywood. Friendship there, said he, is possible only between a man and the "woman or women" he loves.

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